


a bit of love

by hachimitsuto



Category: EXO (Band), f(x)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-04-05 02:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19038928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hachimitsuto/pseuds/hachimitsuto
Summary: Sometimes it takes people so much time to find their way to each other.





	a bit of love

**Author's Note:**

> ∙ based on [this](https://twitter.com/ThoughtCatalog/status/920892377111453696)  
>  ∙ this is a 1.5 years old wip but when i looked at it today my brain just decided to get inspired.
> 
> * * *
> 
> “We were young, we were foolish. We let go of each other’s hands because we thought our dreams and ambitions would make us happy; they did, but the happiness was fleeting.”

 

 

16 is an age too young to make decisions, so more often than not it's the adults who make the choices for them. At 16, Soojung has more people who know her as Krystal and call her with that name. Only a few people still call her Soojung, and among those people, there's Jongin.

Soojung likes the way her name sounds on his tongue, but that's not the only thing that she likes about him. She likes the look in his eyes when he's scrutinizing his own movements in the mirror, the habit of scrunching up his nose he has when he's thinking and the way he’s started to tower over her. They used to stand at similar heights.

“Come here,” she says when their eyes meet through their mirror’s reflection. He does, and Soojung likes this too. He comes when she calls, and goes away when she tells him she's tired.

Jongin sits next to her, close together. They take chances when no one’s around. When it's too late to be a night but too early to be morning, when they think they're really alone, they link their fingers and steal kisses. They're all too rushed, too slow, too high on hormones and too little experience, she can taste his needs and desperation and she likes them nonetheless.

She wraps her hand around his, and immediately, his fingers curl back. Soojung hardly makes any decisions these days - her clothes, makeup, even how she’d spend her days are decided by other people who are supposed to know better. This, is one of the few things she decided by herself. Leaning against his shoulder now, she thinks about the nights she’d spent awake wondering if she’d made the right choice. Sometimes she’d lie awake thinking about him.

Sooyeon thinks Jongin is a bad decision, and thinks that it's just another crush like the one Soojung had on Minho once, so she didn’t say too much and let her. But this is not a puppy love. In fact Soojung doesn't think it's love at all.

Jongin's never walked her home, or at least she never let him. They’ve never talked to each other on the phone all night until one of them fell asleep and woke up to the other’s snore the next morning, or sent good morning texts. They ask about each other's day like it's a part of basic manners, and they don't ever speak of the future because she knows that she's not a part of his plan just like he's not hers.

Still, she does like him, the warmth of his embrace and the softness of his smile. She likes that his height makes her feel shielded somehow and that there’s someone out there who would come running when she calls. Most of all, she likes that she's a step ahead of him, and that sometimes she sees how he looks at her with desperation, like she's the goal he wants to achieve, like she’s all he really wants and not her position.

She closes her eyes and believes just that.

 

 

 

 

 

24 years pass by in a blink of an eye, more or less. She’s an adult now, yet acknowledged by the ones who know better, but she has more control of her own life. Most people still call her Krystal, but strangely she prefers Soojung nowadays. Krystal is the name she gives when she goes to coffee shops in New York, Milan, Paris, wherever her job takes her, wherever she goes on a vacation, but Soojung is the name she misses hearing from a particular voice when the night is quiet and her heart feels emptier than usual.

There are less places to run into each other now, but like forgotten twigs that catch flame all too suddenly, something always ignites whenever they as much as touch. Learned behaviours, bad habits they never properly, completely got rid of.

It’s probably inevitable, she thinks as she’s backed up on the door, his hand gripping her shoulder and her fingers digging into his sides, because neither of them really thought of putting a stop to this. Maybe it’s the familiarity, the rhythmic pulse of his heart when he moves in as her mouth opens up for him and drinks her in with laser focus, hungry yet gentle at the same time.

Maybe it’s just convenient. They’ve known each other long enough to know where their priorities lie, and that sending an I miss you text in between catching up on sleep is not one of them.

“Soojung,” Jongin breathes out, lost in a haze, his hand down her spine. Her eyelashes ghost over the side of his face, and then she presses an open kiss to the exposed curve of his neck. “Soojung.”

Maybe it’s something else altogether. Her breath catches in her throat. His hair’s in disarray, not looking at her. She presses closer so that their lips brush, and kisses him, sucking his bottom lip slowly and long enough that she can imagine how red and swollen it’ll still look tomorrow when they’re too busy trying to become someone else to be each other’s.

Just fleeting happiness. This is as real as love gets, she thinks.

 

 

 

 

 

She gets off at Incheon International Airport at six in the morning after a fifteen hour flight and a two hour layover in Seattle. There’s hardly anyone at the gates when she walks out, large sunglasses covering almost half of her face, a habit she never unlearned.

After it was all over, she flew back to America and got an apartment in the same building as her sister. Sometimes when she misses Seoul, she’d fly back. Less and less people waited for her and mobbed her with camera flashes every time she returned, and now there’s none at all.

No one, except for—

“Soojung,” a familiar voice calls her name that’s not that familiar to her anymore. He pulls on the white paper mask that covers the bottom half of his face—a habit he never unlearned either— and flashes her an all too familiar smile.

Jongin stands in front of her now, hair swept back into a worn out beanie that he’s had for so many years, face flushed with excitement. He looks just like the boy she met all those years ago and like a completely different person at once.

They’re 31 now. So much time has passed since they first met. So much has happened, so many places they’ve gone to, so many people they’ve met and probably a lot more they tried to become. He reaches for his hand, holds it tightly in his.

She smells like the stale airtight cabin and jet fuel and hasn’t looked at herself in the mirror since two hours ago in the small lavatory, but it’s her, not anyone else. Taking off her sunglasses, she looks up at him and can’t help the smile that pushes up her cheeks despite her fatigue and drowsiness. He smells like home.

“I’ve missed you.”

She didn’t know if it was love then, didn’t want to think whether it was. Now, she doesn’t have to think about it. She just knows.

“I’ve missed you too.”


End file.
